


Baying Hounds

by Enygmass



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU, DCU (Comics)
Genre: we love joan leland wow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 09:56:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16116032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Enygmass/pseuds/Enygmass
Summary: Joan Leland's mother only ever gave her one piece of advice when she left her small town to pursue her career - watch for the dogs. She never guessed that the dog would take the guise of a man.





	Baying Hounds

**Author's Note:**

> This is long for me and made because I love Joan Leland and she deserves more???

Anyone who knew the old, and perhaps overused, tale would know that on the first day God created light. He waved his hand and allowed a ball of fire appear in the sky to illuminate the blank canvas he had yet to drag his brush across; in modern terms, it would be like a writer turning on their computer only to be blinded by the screen brightness. Joan liked to imagine – at least, in private – that the light had been there in the tale long before God had waved any hand. He merely forgot to turn it on.

This cynical point of view carried her through many hours of schooling where she was dragged from a Sister Grace to a Sister Anne and, on more than one occasion, to the Mother Supreme to be reprimanded over some controversial claim she had made in class that undermined the traditional teachings. Joan always had a love for the mind, hoarding novels of the brains functions in her boardroom, and she firmly believed that any problem could be fixed with the right amount of attention and care – contrary to the claims being made by a few of her teachers that unseen forces are to blame. She didn’t believe them one bit. In fact, she went out of her way to disprove them.

When she graduated, it was a celebrated feat, and when she told her parents she was going to become a psychologist, they took it in stride. She would be the first Leland to pursue a secondary education. Her father and mother had both lived in the same grubby rural town their entire lives, and forfeited the chance for more schooling, preferring to settle in to the mundane life of farming – a career that was generational for them. Her siblings, all three of them, were far too young to entertain the idea of high school let alone university. The children only cared about bugs and trees and for them, given that they were three boys above all, the highlight of the day was running barefoot in the corn stalks. There was something about the innocence and bliss that they carried that Joan knew she would miss when she finally waved the silos farewell.

She wasn’t surprised when her mother pulled her outside on the final night. With the company of the crickets playing their song and the flashes of the fireflies between the swaying stalks, they stood together and stared out at the landscape, now shadowed in night with the stars drowned out by the light from the home they left behind.

“Baying hounds will come, Joanie.” Her mothers voice was gruff, suiting her stature. She was a woman built of stone, her darkened skin cracked with premature wrinkles and worn from the earth. A woman built of clay, hardened in the fires of the sun and taught to endure life by grasping the weeds by their stems and ripping up. Her strength reflected on the children she raised.

“They’ll howl, spit, and bite at your ankles.” Joan said nothing as she listened to her mother talk. A cool breeze had picked up, signifying the beginning of harvest and the end of her final summer. “Because they won’t like someone like you trying to take away their prize. But you need to remember, Joanie, that even the dogs grow tired of their howling after a while. You just need to show them that you aren’t going to bend to their demands.”

The hug that followed was unexpected. Mrs. Leland wasn’t always a woman of affection, but when Joan was drawn into her arms in a hug that was warm and tight and held promise, she reciprocated it without a second thought. Her mothers’ words echoed in her mind as she felt tears on her shoulder. A sinking feeling in her gut told her that this parting may be more permanent than she believed.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Her first day at Gotham University proved to be much like navigating a labyrinth. She had lived too far out to attend any open houses, finding classes was a feat that she needed to grasp on her own. Navigation was never her strong suit, though, so it hadn’t come as a shock when she learned she was on one side of campus and her lecture room on the opposite side. This alone resulted in the most admirable – and possibly record breaking – speed walk she ever performed. It hadn’t helped the snub of embarrassment when she entered the lecture hall nearly thirty minutes late, interrupting the professor mid-syllabus run down. The walk down the steps to the single empty seat felt more like a funerary procession with the eyes of her curious classmates on her back, the stares reflecting themselves in a burning red on her cheeks. Only after she sunk down into the seat that did usual hum and drawl of a university class reassumed. The boy next to her, though, continued his crippling glare.

“Has he said much?” She whispered the words to him, unsure if he would even respond, as she dug around her bag to find whatever pen was buried at the bottom. To her surprise, the boy had given a response.

“No.” Curt, cold, and polite, but spoken with a southern accent that could honey the reply with the illusion of care. Joan just nodded in thanks as the boy had looked away. There was something unsettling about his stare that rendered Joan to silence for the remainder of the lecture.

The look had seemed so _empty._

____________________________________________________________________________________

First year passed in a haze of celebration and despair, from the first ninety to the drop in grade percentage post-exam. She had not returned home that summer as the pressures of adulthood and finances forced her to take on a job at the local library. To her surprise, the boy from the first class appeared to have had a similar idea. Second year arrived with falling leaves and ended with falling snow, and Joan learned the boys name was Jonathan. Despite the differences already forming between them in terms of treatment plans for patients, they had both begrudgingly acknowledged the others ability to get work done and found themselves paired for assignments on more than one occasion. Third year had retained this habit, but it was with fourth year that a jolt in routine occurred.

“Did Professor Bramowitz give you the position?” The question, though posed with delicacy, seemed to have an underlying venom to it that had caught Joan off-guard enough to get her to look up from her thesis work. Jonathan hadn’t looked up himself and kept a schooled impassive expression on. “He hasn’t got back to me.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t received any requests from him to go to his office.” She knew that Jonathan had applied for the graduate student position in his lab as well. Every student knew that the ticket to a possible career was through Bramowitz’s lab. Or, at least, Joan and Jonathan knew. “He probably won’t notify either of us until closer to graduation.”

She returned her attention to the thesis work for only a few moments before Jonathan interrupted again.

“I don’t think you’ll get it.”

The comment caused Joan to look up, her brow knitted in confusion. Jonathan hadn’t even paused in his writing to acknowledge what he had said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, I don’t think you’ll get it.” Finally, that detached blue gaze lifted from the paper to meet hers, accompanied with a slight smirk that curled on Jonathan’s too-thin lips.

“You lack ambition, you know. You’re excellent at following instructions but you seem incapable of fostering the idea for an experiment yourself. The purpose of a grad thesis and grad research is to prove that you can do such a thing. You?” He offered her a mockery of a sympathetic look as he returned to his writing. “You’re more of a lackey than a leader.”

Joan stared. It took more than a moment for his comments to sink in, but when they had it created a toxic environment in her gut that burned to her throat. She knew Jonathan was brutally honest, even if his honesty was unnecessary. She also knew that he wanted this position more than anything else – he hounded for it like a _dog._

“And I suppose you already have a masterful experiment drawn up?” Now venom interjected _Joan’s_ voice which elicited an arched eyebrow from her companion. He hummed once, twice, and then a smile broke out on his face that was filled with more enjoyment than Joan had seen in all four years of knowing him.

“As a matter of fact, I do. Joan, what are you afraid of? Rejection? Failure?” He ticked off the options with his slender fingers as Joan set her pen down. “I know your mother hasn’t been well. Are you afraid her ailment will consume her before you say goodbye? You haven’t been home in nearly four years. Or are you afraid for your brothers? What will they do if your parents go and you must forfeit your career to watch them? I’d hate to return to **my** hometown.”

“What are you getting at, Jonathan?” She was angry now, but not the screaming and shouting kind. Her anger towards him simmered below the flesh in a slow, grueling motion; her anger was the anger that drove queens to plot the deaths of their kings and heirs to drip arsenic in the meals of their predecessors for the dragged-out demise. Joan never shouted and never cried, but she remembered.

“I have a hypothesis for a method that could wipe those fears from your mind as quickly as they arrive. I don’t need to go into details with you, since your involvement won’t exist, but the opportunity to test this out has given me the ambition for this position. I can be quite persuasive, you know.” He stared at her and she stared back, refusing to turn her gaze away and signify that somehow, he had dug his way into her mind. Jonathan Crane was one of the hounds her mother had warned her about – she couldn’t show that he made her bend.

“Well, if you do get it, I’m sure you’ll do fantastic things. But first, why don’t you finish that thesis?” She gestured to his paper, which already looked basically completed, and offered her own smile. Kill them with kindness after all. “It looks good so far.”

“Just don’t get your hopes up.” His rebuttal to this was mumbled as if it were a last hurrah before he listened to her suggestion and dug his pen back into his book. Silence between them was preferable to the tension of conversation.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

They both benefitted in the end.

Joan had not earned the position, but that didn’t mean that she received the short end of the stick. As quickly as her rejection letter came, the opportunity for an internship with Arkham took its place. Joan accepted without a moment of hesitation. That fascination with the mind and the belief that care was key to the road to recovery still sat in the forefront of her conscious, driving her to demonstrate to the doctor’s her willingness to be the best. Jonathan, on the flip side, had gained his opportunity to pursue his experiment he had spoken so fondly about. Joan hadn’t remained in contact with him long enough to hear anything further.

Years slipped by like water over stone, and she had found herself moving from an internship to a permanent position in the Arkham staff. She had been privileged enough to witness the initiation of a new cognitive program of her own design, and the dismissal of outdated methods. She watched numerous inmates come and go, with most almost entirely cured save for a few extra sessions. It had been in her office where she had first heard news of the rise of Batman, who at the time had not earned the nickname yet, and of the arrival of the Joker. She had been in her office as well when Joker had been brought to Arkham – one of the many costumed rogues to come.

But it had been in the halls during a required round to ensure that patients were comfortable that she heard his voice again. Curt, cold, and polite, but spoken with a southern accent that could honey it with the illusion of care. It locked her feet to the floor and ignited ripples of shock across her skin. It forced her head to snap to her left, where in a darkened cell a detached blue gaze watched her with an air of amusement.

“Joan.” From his lips her name sounded more like a curse, a hex, something meant to make another suffer. He leaned forward from his spot on his bed to reveal his dark hair, which had once been kept neat in their undergrad years, now matted and disarrayed. The patchwork of fading bruises which marred his gaunt cheeks and added darkness to his eyes twisted and pulled as his still too-thin lips stretched into a grin of greeting. His teeth looked yellow in the hall lights. “It’s been quite a while, hasn’t it?”

Whispers that were commonly heard from the intensive ward now fell to a silent hum at this exchange, and Joan felt like she was back in that first day of classes, with the boy glaring at her and her classmates’ eyes on her back. She straightened herself up and offered her own smile in response.

“It has, hasn’t it? I can’t say I’m happy to be reunited under these circumstances.” Jonathan let out a bark of a laugh that caught Joan off-guard – something he seemed to have a talent at _doing_. It occurred to her that in the four years he had known her, she had never heard him _laugh_ before. It wasn’t a pleasant noise.

“No, no. This isn’t the most ideal.” His chuckling faded away to silence as he looked her over as if she were something subpar to his standards. “I’m surprised you made it this far. A doctor at Arkham, a permanent position, heading a ward on your own.”

She knew there was more to come. With Jonathan, there was always an insult to follow the compliment, and it came at no shock when it did.

“I see that lack of ambition you had actually did get you somewhere in the end, didn’t it?” Jonathan was still staring at her because he wanted her to give a reaction. It was simple psychology, it was simply Jonathan. He was always poking and prodding and digging into you until you broke.

The simmering anger Joan once felt reignited. Her throat burned as recollections of how **cruel** he had been to hinder her development were brought forth again. But her time at Arkham, dealing with men like Jonathan daily, taught her more than a few tricks and tips. She knew that most of his desire to rip others down to his level stemmed from his own insecurity. And if there was one thing she learned in the years she had known him from both conversation and work alone, it was that Jonathan Crane was _insecure_.

“I see that ambition you had got you somewhere as well.” Her expression schooled to a sympathetic look, just as his had when he spoke to her over their thesis papers.

Jonathan wanted to tear his past to bits – Professor Berkowitz, Sherry Squires, Bo Griggs, - Joan had skimmed the casefiles and had heard the doctors’ comments. He wanted a clean slate for the Scarecrow to be built from, and any reminiscence of Jonathan had to be removed for this. It was too bad that Joan wasn’t an ink blot in the text of his life that could be scrubbed away.

“I meant my words, you know. You could have done fantastic things.”A pause was slotted in to emphasize her next point. “It’s just a shame that you approached it in the wrong way.”Her fingers skimmed through the papers on the clipboard she held, names flashing before her eyes, before her index stopped and rested on one name carved into the white with red ink. When she looked to him, his smile was no more. In its place was malignant _amusement_ , combined with a subtle touch of _frustration_.

This only made her smile more genuine.

“We can catch up in our first session together. I’m sure my office will be a much more ideal place than these damp halls.” She let the papers drop as his breath escaped him in a drawn-out hiss. “I look forward to it.”

_“As do I.”_

At this, Joan turned and reassumed her walk, leaving Jonathan to stew alone in the dark once more. In the silence that followed her to the doors, Joan knew that their exchange was only the start. The baying hounds her mother had warned her about on that final summer night had exhausted themselves to silence. At least, for now.


End file.
